Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962 (The German List) - Hardcover

Adorno, Theodor W.

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9781906497217: Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962 (The German List)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906497214 ISBN 13: 9781906497217

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2009

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Although Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a composer and successful music critic. Night Music presents the first complete English translations of two collections of texts compiled by German philosopher and musicologist Adorno—Moments musicaux, containing essays written between 1928 and 1962, and Theory of New Music, a group of texts written between 1929 and 1955.

In Moments musicaux, Adorno echoes Schubert’s eponymous cycle, with its emphasis on aphorism, and offers lyrical reflections on music of the past and his own time. The essays include extended aesthetic analyses that demonstrate Adorno’s aim to apply high philosophical standards to the study of music. Theory of New Music, as its title indicates, presents Adorno’s thoughts and theories on the composition, reception, and analysis of the music that was being written around him. His extensive philosophical writing ultimately prevented him from pursuing the compositional career he had once envisaged, but his view of the modern music of the time is not simply that of a theorist, but clearly also that of a composer. Though his advocacy of the Second Viennese School, comprising composer Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, is well known, many of his writings in this field have remained obscure. Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in Night Music show the breadth of Adorno’s musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker.

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About the Author:

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) was the author of Minima Moralia, Philosophy of Modern Music, and Prisms, among many other books. Wieland Hoban is a British composer who lives in Germany. He has translated several works of Adorno, including his correspondence with Alban Berg and Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction.

From Publishers Weekly:

Wonderfully displaying the verve and richness of Adorno's provocative ideas on the composition and development of classical and modern music and their necessary relationship to historical and material contexts, this volume brings together two significant collections of essays, Moments Musicaux and Theory of New Music, from the German collected works of one of the 20th century's most dazzling yet perplexing philosophers. The fidelity to the ordering of the original German editions allows some of the less well-known essays (such as those on Ravel and Offenbach) to thematically and stylistically resonate in the company of the famous (and infamous) works on Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg and jazz. With only a short introduction and occasional footnotes, the collection would perhaps have benefited from a preliminary consideration of the author's complex notions of subjectivity, objectivity and historical materialism that underpin his understanding of the development of music from Beethoven to the new music of 12-tone composition and beyond. Nonetheless, despite their undeniable and frequent difficulty, the blend of precise music analysis, sociohistorical awareness and stylized writing in the individual texts is always engrossing reading. (Oct.)
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